Information and communication technologies enabled assisted living: An integration of RFID and web service

Abstract

Everybody touches the healthcare issues. However, people 65 years and over need more than everyone and three primary forces affect their live: 1) their population increase; 2) they need more healthcare support; and 3) their incomes decrease. Availability of their care in their own homes is imperative because of the economic reasons and their choices where to live. Recent advancement in the information and communication technology are creating a new types of services. For instance, wireless communications and electronics have enabled the development of lowcost sensor networks and they can be employed in smart homes, ehealthcare applications and assisted living services. These statements show that there is a great promise in wireless technology and utilizing it in assisted living might be very beneficial to the elderly people. In this chapter, we propose a software architecture called the Location Windows Service (LWS) which integrates the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology and the web service to build an assisted living system for elderly people at home. This architecture monitors the location of elderly people without interfering in their daily activities. Location information messages that are generated as the elderly move from room to room indicate that the elderly person is fit and healthy and going about their normal life. The communication must be timely enough to follow elderly people as they move from room to room without missing a location. Unacknowledged publishing, subscription filtering and short location change messages are also included in this software model to reduce the network traffic in large homes. © 2013 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.